In many servers, such as rack-mounted servers in a data center, circuit boards for the servers are housed in a chassis, such as a rack-mounted chassis. Typically, the chassis houses a motherboard assembly, additional circuit boards, such as memory modules or networking modules, coupled to the motherboard assembly, and a power supply for the electrical component in the chassis. The chassis may also house hard disk drives, fans, or other components.
Often additional circuit boards included in a server chassis are connected to the motherboard assembly via cables or soldered connections. However, in the case of cabling, the cables may block airflow through the chassis. Also, in the case of soldered connections, it may be difficult, complex, and/or labor intensive to initially solder one or more connections between an additional circuit board and a motherboard assembly, and it may also be difficult to subsequently disconnect the additional circuit board connected to the motherboard assembly via the one or more soldered connections.
For server systems comprising multiple additional circuit boards, communications between the additional circuit boards may be routed through the mother board via connections between the additional circuit boards and the motherboard assembly. However, such communications routed through the motherboard may consume signal capacity and processing capacity of the motherboard that could otherwise be used to perform other operations.
While the invention is susceptible to various modifications and alternative forms, specific embodiments thereof are shown by way of example in the drawings and will herein be described in detail. It should be understood, however, that the drawings and detailed description thereto are not intended to limit the invention to the particular form disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope of the present invention as defined by the appended claims. The headings used herein are for organizational purposes only and are not meant to be used to limit the scope of the description or the claims. As used throughout this application, the word “may” is used in a permissive sense (i.e., meaning having the potential to), rather than the mandatory sense (i.e., meaning must). Similarly, the words “include,” “including,” and “includes” mean including, but not limited to.